Young Man Weber

Abstract

Scholarship on Max Weber and in social theory has taken an interest? ing and important turn in recent years. The new perspective involves the rediscovery of Weber as an economist and his writings on topics in political economy and social economics?Sozial?konomik in his terminology?or, as we would tend to say today, economic sociology. In the English-speaking world the work of Richard Swedberg has assisted the movement in this di? rection (Swedberg 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003; Weber 1999a), following upon earlier efforts by Keith Tribe, myself (Scaff 1989, ch. 2) and others (see Tribe 1989; Schluchter 1980). In Germany the shift in interest has received en? couragement from the editing of Weber's collected works, the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, and particularly the recent contributions of the economist Knut Borchardt to understanding Weber's early writings in the 1890s on the stock and commodity exchanges, commercial relationships, and the institu? tions of modern capitalism (Borchardt 1999, 2000; Weber 1999b; also Lesti tion 2000). As Borchardt acknowledges, the economic dimension to Weber's thought was already highlighted previously in some of the essays of Wilhelm Hennis devoted to Weber's relationship to the economists of his day, men like Carl Menger, Gustav Schmoller, and his Heidelberg teacher, Karl Knies, whom he replaced in 1897 (Hennis 1998, 2000). These figures framed the late nineteenth-century debate over theory and method, setting the histori? cal school dominant in Berlin against the marginalists prominent in Vienna, a disputation that Weber sought to resolve in some of his methodological writings and work in social economics, including the systematic presentation in Part I of Economy and Society. In addition to these contributions, this hid? den side of Weber's thinking and its historical and biographical sources has been given a corrective reading in Guenther Roth's extensive investigations of the international cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, with emphasis on the Weber family and their transnational business and financial connections (see Roth 2001, 2002, 2003.)